Nathalie
lowe represents an interesting view of how the state by way of laws concerning immigration can produce a certain kind of citizenship. How is this case different than for other immigrants ? Or can we apply her method to look at other immigrant communities ?
Alison
Lowe seems to be saying that the “contradictions of Asian immigration” point our contradictions of capitalism. Does this work for you? What are the contradictions?
Lauren
On page 23 Lowe argues that, “the civil rights project confronts its limits where the pursuit of enfranchisement coincides with a refortification of the state as guarantor of rights and precludes the necessary critique of the state as the protector of liberal capitalism, steadily dividing the racialized labor force it continues to exclude from those rights.” Can we interpret this historical moment as a manifestation of the theoretical idea that to discuss the state is to reify the state?
Mary
I wonder if this would constitute a sort of feminizing of Asian Immigration Law? If so, does this change the discussion made by the author? I'm not quite sure of all of the questions I'm formulating at the moment—but I am wondering about the notions of capital and labor here. Refugee seekers are not evaluated in terms of the labor they can offer to the state (at least they're not supposed to)—and I also wonder if this potential feminization in Asian refugee law, rather than in “pure: immigration law, exists because refugees are largely separated from notions of labor and the workforce (at least in terms of policy and theory)?
Dannah
I like the way that Lisa Lowe offers some concrete advice at the end of this chapter. Don't like the way that race, class, and gender are handled in the American classroom? Change the curriculum, change the pedagogy. I'm afraid, though, that her suggestions aren't very robust and could lead to a sort of curricular tokenism (as in "we read the Joy Luck Club, so now we know everything about Asian American women's literature!") How can we, as products and practioners of Western education, avoid being part of the ideological state apparatus?
Cathy
Lowe argues “The result is a contradiction in which “culture” remains canonical in the traditional Western European sense, while the educational system (claiming a “multicultural” conscience) serves to socialize and incorporate students from other backgrounds into the capitalist market economy” (40). This seems like a similar device to that of the development projects that initiate hegemonic processes under the guise of helping others. Is the multicultural conscience a gateway into homogenizing and assimilating others as Lowe suggests?
Grace
Lowe presents the idea of the immigrant as a break in the vertical conception of the state and its 'subjects,' and proposes that it allows us to look horizontally for relationships between immigrants and other groups that are also subjected to the state, while not actually examining the state/citizen bind. Is this an example of Timothy Mitchell's proposal that we look for clues as to why the state appears to be a coherent entity by looking at the fuzzy boundaries between state and society?
Josh
What do we make of Lowe's triptych chapter titles (1, 2, 3, 5, 7)?
Lauren
Can the repression of gender bias among Asian Americans be understood in the context of Wendy Brown’s argument for the inherently masculine quality of the state? Is that inherently masculine quality of the state something that pervades different cultural manifestations and understandings of the state? Does being a racial minority, already subject to the prejudices of the state, set the stage for women to be further repressed within their own ethnic groups? And whatare the implications for white women in relation to Lowe’s suggestion that women of color might gain grounds by joining together and identifying beyond cultural categories?
Alison
What exactly is she suggesting as a strategy for “transforming hegemony?” (83) (The points she makes seems to point to this as a goal which she proposes in this chapter.)
Mary
This chapter discusses a main question I have with this piece: to what extent should we attempt to understand or group Asian American culture or the Asian American experience as one whole and to what extent should we seek to differentiate between individual experience?
Dannah
I understand her point that "hybridization is not the 'free' oscillation between or among chosen identities" (82); it is often the result of messy and violent processes. However, I don't think she's leaving space here for the creative combining of cultural forms which, I would argue, does occur as people try to make sense of and express their (multiple) selves. In other words, I agree that hybridization isn't all good. But does it have to be all bad?
Nathalie
Would it be useful to use the concept of liminality to look at immigrant experiences ? Are they not all to some extent "betwixt and between"? Extra question: how can we look at "dual citizenship" as a particular kind of citizenship? What would we need to take into consideration ?
Josh
Lowe suggests that subaltern groups have common, entwined interests that might be advanced through the unity of what are often presented as distinct positions; through which means can these groups unite without presenting themselves as homogenized, essentialized and thus differentiating peoples?
Grace
Lowe's version of ‘nation’ (via Franz Fanon) is an "essentialized bourgeois construction that excludes subaltern groups that could bring about change in social and economic relations." Is she proposing that nation is an imagined community that actively excludes others that do not share this imagination, or is she in some sense melding the state and society (as we've been warned against by previous readings) as a coherent hegemonic entity that only incorporates others as hyphenated-Americans?
Dannah
Do we agree that immigrant communities/writers can engage in the sort of "decolonization" that Lowe (channeling Fanon) describes? More broadly, I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to maintain an analytic distinction between diasporic individuals/communities and colonial/postcolonial subjects.
Grace
Blood, Gossip and Space serve, for Lowe, as modes of storytelling that evoke a material, "from the inside out" history rather than a linear, "official" one, and in doing so, question the importance of representing authenticity. It is fairly clear how this differs from the way that "history" is traditionally written and taught in the West, but how is does it differ from the traditional 'western' novel, and how does she propose we use it in terms of representing history outside of the novel?
Mary
I know that Lowe mentions an entire discourse on gossip and rumor that I am not versed in personally—however, I was struck by ways in which gossip functioned in similar ways though in very different contexts in these two pieces (both in a destructuring sense). I wonder if we can use gossip, or rumor, as a tool to understand the state or nation or citizenship? If gossip is used by the people to destructure or challenge the establishment (state, nation, history, literature), can we use it to understand how these entities are then constructed?
Dannah
I think Lowe is spot-on when she argues that "For Asian immigrant women, the American contract of citizenship is quite evidently contradictory; if it proposes the state as the unified body in which all equal subjects are granted membership, it simultaneously asks that differences-- of race, class, gender, and locality-- be subordinated in order to qualify for membership in that democratic body" (162). (Here's that body metaphor again!) I realize that her work is focused on Asian immigrant women, but would it be safe to extend this statement to all immigrants to the US? In what ways would it apply (or not) to other immigrant groups?
Grace
Immigration is at once a site of contradiction between capital and state and a source of change and transformation within the site. Where does Lowe see this transformation leading?
Nathalie
In this chapter, Lowe suggests that Asian American novels can displace material histories. How can we reconcile this with her discussion of the classroom as an ineveitable site for the reproduction of a dominant hegemonic discourse and how to we place the view that these novels present in the context of programs such as Asian-American studies?
Josh
At various points Lowe suggests that sites of "the convergence of differences" resist singular representation and create a space of possibility for new formations to emerge. Are the sites of contradiction created by a dominant structure included spaces that absorb challenges or do they hold the potential for meaningful change?
Nathalie
How does our understanding of nation as an imagined community change in light of emergent political formations and neocolonial powers?
Cathy
In speaking of the colonial subject’s encounter with hegemony Lowe writes “Such encounters produce contradictory subjects, in whom the demands for fluency in imperial languages and empire's cultural institutions simultaneously provide the grounds for antagonism to those demands” (97) a process she later terms disidenification. What are the implications of Lowe’s asserting agency to the Asian American immigrant?
Grace
Is this book essentially a postmodern critique of representation?
Mary
However, in this passage (particularly in the second sentence) and through Lowe's discussion of history, she is suggesting a different and non-temporal reading of culture. In this reading of culture, that is more akin to the ways in which Asian Americans experience culture, culture is simultaneously individualistic and collective. Culture does not divorce its present from the past, rather culture is a product of remembering, of a sort of collective history. History cannot be divorced from the present. Culture becomes thought of and practiced by both the individual and the collective as non-temporal—the present and the past operate simultaneously; the future is always involved as well. I don't think we quite said this in class—but I wonder if I am grasping Lowe's use of history and culture at all? If I am, I wonder then if history and culture become both contradictions and complements?
Alison
What are Asian American conceptions of collectivity based upon and how are they situated within the US? What is the exchange between this collectivity and that of other immigrant groups--do they fall within a larger collective or maintain individual divisions?
Mary
Throughout this piece, Lowe shows us how the state and the capitalist economical structure are not in unison, particularly when considering Asian American immigration. I wonder how this fits into our previous discussions of the state? It seemed that a lot of authors suggested that the state and the economic structure have many of the same goals, or may be the same entity in some ways. While, many authors argued that there is a separation. I wonder what this book does to our thoughts on the state and the capitalist economic structure?
Cathy
In a similar vein as in the above assertion, Lowe speaks of the contradiction that the very process of creating a racializied female proletariat makes available the displacement of traditional and national patriarchs. Can agency be attainable in this breakdown?
Cathy
Lowe’s work makes use of a multiplicity of sites that cross various borders, media forms, and literature. Could this be useful for anthropological/ethnographic methodologies?
Josh
Compared to history, fiction has had more space for challenges to the dominant (historical) narrative. Might destabilizing the fiction/non-fiction opposition in historical narrative be a more useful project than producing a multiplicity of supposedly non-fictional historical narratives?
Alison
Lowe touches on grand narratives in this chapter, arguing that they have been used in the US to form a cultural identity and seems to be saying that Asian American writing counters those narratives. However, do Asian American literary works carry their own grand narratives with them? How does one get away from including them in historical works and how is she arguing that Asian American literature doesn't use them?
Lauren
Something that I felt was missing in all of this, and maybe it was more present in the couple of chapters we didn’t read, or maybe I just didn’t understand things, was a more concrete identification of who was creating these alternatively cultural products. I know there were discussions of Asian and American born Asian Americans, and well as discussions on generational experiences, but particularly in the case of the literary examples, the syntax and content of the works were analyzed, but not so much the personal identities of the authors. Does the desire for a personal history of the author subject them to this controversial construction of a static or identifiable history that she cautions us against? Or can it be identified as a somewhat ethnographic impulse? If these writers are writing “novels,” which Lowe distinguishes from “testimony,” does not the personal experience of the author in some way significantly influence the content of the text?
